Earlier today in a small talk me and some other individuals came to the conclusion it would be beneficial if RVGL's source code was open source or at least open to more people to work on. Currently only Huki and Marv really have access to it and only Huki is currently really working on updating the game. This, especially with the current activity from the community, seems to be too much for a single person to handle perhaps. So, with this in mind, it might be in our best interests to actually open it up to more, as this could have the result of more talented people learning about how it is put together and figuring out how it could be improved as well. I am not the only one who thinks this way and my personal interest in just seeing how the game ticks, makes me sad to know I don't have the opportunity to look into it and try to experiment and understand it.

So what is everyone's thoughts on this? Should it be made public, or at least open to more individuals to work on?

Marv himself has stated that he wishes for RVGL to be open source in the past, but legal issues are preventing this. Keep in mind that we do not own the rights to the Revolt IP; WEGO does. There is a very real possibility of them suing or otherwise getting the dev team into legal trouble, where they to release "their" property. Until something happens (be it WEGO dying, us obtaining the rights or something else that removes this problem), it's unlikely to happen.

That said, I too really wish it happens some day. I'd love to mess aroud with/try to improve it.

There are many of us—if not the majority of the community—who would love to have RVGL turned open-source. It would significantly speed up the development of the project, we would see new features much more often, and I bet a lot of people—myself included—would love to tinker with a much more solid source code than the outdated, bug-ridden mess from the Xbox version of the game. However, there are a couple of things that might prevent this from happening.

Firstly, this could easily turn into a free-for-all deathmatch with each person making their own version of the game, and it bears the risk of splintering the community between a myriad versions of Re-Volt. As it was mentioned on Discord, something like this already happened back in 2014 or so, with various sides of the community split up between multiple versions of the 1.2 patch. Imagine how much likelier this could be if just about anyone could create a new version of RVGL. If the source will be opened up, we need a way to ensure centralizing the game, offering a main version that most people would use. In theory, this should be already doable with re-volt.io, but I think we would still need to take further measures to prevent it.

Secondly, in the end, it all comes down to Huki. He is the one who put most effort into this project and it's fully within his right to not open up its source, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Sadly, I believe he has not yet stated his stance on this matter yet.

I'm sure there are even more potential concerns out there, but this is all I can think of for now. Rather than making it open-source, there's also the alternative of increasing the size of the team. This should more or less get rid of the first problem I mentioned, but in the end, it will still fully depend on Huki.

Our intention is to open up RVGL source eventually along similar lines to Quake or Doom series. I'd like to point to the RVGL Roadmap to know more about the direction we're heading. But, I don't want this to be a hasty decision and the short-term concerns outweigh any long term benefits right now.

Firstly, this could easily turn into a free-for-all deathmatch with each person making their own version of the game, and it bears the risk of splintering the community between a myriad versions of Re-Volt.

The situation is much worse, because there would be no way to prevent modified versions from affecting online sessions. It just makes all cheat detection and version checking useless. This needs be handled with some careful centralization, as you've pointed out.

i/o today allows itself to run a Re-Volt server that looks like some kind of intolerable ideological dictatorship ...
A Re-Volt server must be neutral, objective, and must defend what Re-Volt was, is and will be ...
And it is clear that if a future centralization had to be done, it must be done in a neutral way and without collaboration with the team i/o ...

Can you elaborate on this? The IO community is not directly related with the development of RVGL:

If you're referring to the custom content (the IO packs) that are distributed with the game, those are optional; you can download the game with only its original content here, under Original.

If you're referring to the RVGL downloads being on the re-volt.io domain, this is simply because this is most convenient. You're free to redistribute them.

If you're referring to the Discord server, it's a seperate entity, not related to either IO or the development of RVGL.

Well, the discussion died a little soon, which is a little sad to see, but at least it does look we all agree that moving in the direction of opening it up to at least a few more people at a time is a good step to make.

In response to this, I like to suggest to make some sort of application form for people who'd like to help out or announce that the team can use a few extra hands. Of course, this is something the existing team will have to agree with and whatever they find a suitable decision to make in these regards.